Brighton Rock

Özet

Pinkie Brown is a small-town hoodlum whose gang runs a protection racket based at Brighton race course. When Pinkie orders the murder of a rival, Fred, the police believe it to be suicide. This doesn’t convince Ida Arnold, who was with Fred just before he died, and she sets out to find the truth.

A British noir that was fun in all the right places - a truly cold hearted bad guy and true joy and pleasure in a nosy woman who plays amateur detective with a big mouth and a self confessed inability not to ask lots of questions - real fun as noirs should be:

I just love Graham Greene stories, so perhaps I am biased in my review. This is a great little British noir with a fine early performance by Attenborough. This is one Greene novel I havent read, but I heard the ending was changed. Still a good film, even with alterations to the source material.

Near the end, the nun talks about "the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God." I think we all need a little of that strangeness. Dickie is quite good in this little thriller where he seems to be channeling Peter Lorre. He's a live wire bursting with nervous energy.

A Freudian story with a 17 years old bad boy who kills his substitute father, his older pal Spicer and is chased by his substitute mother, artist/hooker Ida Arnold. It's a film noir without shadows, a flat movie. Recommended though because it's a rare pleasure to rediscover Brighton in the year 1947.

Very good adaptation of a pretty damn good book. Attenborough's Pinkie Brown is as cold as movie villains come. I'd give it five stars but I thought it left unresolved a lot of the homosexual subtext that it built throughout the first 2/3 of the film

Periodic strong segments and some good performances still don't bring this film as a whole above a mid-level production. Worth watching, but only occasionally riveting. Very interesting to see the young Richard Attenborough as the gangster Pinkie Brown. I think Johnny Depp might have modeled some of his performances at least partly on Pinkie Brown.